09:30:00

“Ambitious…but brilliant! I don’t believe it, I swear I do not believe it!”

There's little doubt what Alex Revell's defining moment for Rotherham United was.His breathtaking second goal in the League One play-off final last May sent him into club folklore and helped the Millers win promotion from the depths of despair.Here's the story of that goal, taken from Reliving The Dream, a book telling the story of the club's rise back to the second tier.

For a split second Wembley
stood still in silence. He was miles out but it looked like it was going to be
close from the moment it left his boot.
The ball flew at a rate of knots, it
had a chance. Jamie Jones, the Orient goalkeeper, was desperately
back-pedalling. He was in trouble. It’s in, it’s in, it’s in.
The ball dipped
over the out-stretched hand of Jones and finally, after what seemed like a
lifetime in the air, bounced into the net.
And then the silence was broken, the
hordes of red behind the goal erupted into ecstasy and Alex Revell’s life
changed forever.

It doesn’t take a
genius to work out that Revell has never scored a better goal than his 40-yard
volley which drew Rotherham level in their biggest game in 10 years.No matter
what he goes on to achieve in the rest of his career, it’s unlikely he will
score another one as good as that. It was a simply stunning strike and not one
you would necessarily expect from the big man. It would have been worth
cherishing whatever circumstances, but for Revell to deliver that at the moment
he did and on the stage he did – wow!

The Millers had
been in need of something special. The game looked dead and buried at half-time
as Orient had taken an even first period by the scruff of the neck with two
goals in five minutes.

But after a Churchillian Steve Evans told his side to go
out and ‘do it for their families', they took notice.
Revell, fired up by his
young son Charlie who he had seen crying at the interval, got his side back
into it with a poacher’s finish 10 minutes after the restart, but he saved his
best for the crucial leveller.
After Ben Pringle’s long ball was knocked down
by Kieran Agard, the former Orient striker controlled on his thigh and then let
fly from distance with a right-footed volley that ended up in the back of the
net.
All of Revell’s goals this season were celebrated as if they had been
once-in-a-lifetime stunning efforts at Wembley to haul his side level in the play-off
final so he’d had plenty of practice at what he was going to do when it
actually happened.
He sprinted off to the far corner in utter delirium, whacked
the corner flag and was mobbed by his team-mates.
With the Millers eventually
going on to win promotion, Revell had written his name into club folklore and
doing it on such a big stage with millions watching on TV, he had put himself
firmly in the limelight.

“Revell. Ambitious…but
brilliant! I don’t believe it. I swear I do not believe it,” was the soundbite
from Sky TV commentator Daniel Mann and it’s a piece of iconic commentary that
will be put alongside Brian Chapple’s famous description of Alan Lee’s
promotion-winning goal in the vault. We know how you feel, Daniel, we couldn’t
believe it either! It was not something that had been seen too often from the
former Orient frontman, who had no qualms about breaking his old team-mates’
hearts. His 13 goals for the season was an impressive haul, but his role
entailed so much more than that and he was pivotal to the way the Millers had
set up to play during the season. He’d worked so hard, often on the end of
physical batterings from ruffian centre-halves and was a real team player.
Arguably no one deserved that moment more than him.

Mann and 20,000 Rotherham
fans were not the only people who were in disbelief, though, as Revell himself
thought he was dreaming.“I am
still struggling to believe what happened,” he said in the immediate aftermath. “As a kid, you dream of playing at Wembley and having your family watching and
it was an amazing day and what dreams are made of, and mine have come
true. It still feels as if I can’t put into words the feeling.

“When it broke to me, it was
just an instinctive thing. Maybe it was something I haven’t showed enough of
since I have been here. "I know it sounds funny but it was probably the
easiest goal I have ever scored because it was just there, it was instinctive. I
don’t remember it, it was just a dream. "I didn’t even see it hit the net, I
just saw the goalkeeper struggling. The crowd just went quiet for that split
second and things like that you take in. I just remember running to the corner.
It’s amazing.”

It was
a moment that every Rotherham United fan will remember for the rest of their
life. Lee’s strike against Brentford has been known for much of the last decade
as ‘that’ goal, but Revell could be
laying claim to the title for the next few years.